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The Governor-Buster Saga Starts Again with
MAX400 ,
Published: September 5, 2006
by Timothy Prickett Morgan , IT Jungle
Here we go again. And maybe, like Wagner's Ring Cycle, the saga of the
OS/400 and i5/OS governor busters will ultimately have four cycles in
it. Last week, yet another governor buster jumped into the fray, with a
South Korean company called MAX400 Software launching a product called
MAX400, which the company says can make raw batch or server capacity in
an AS/400, iSeries, or i5 machine available to 5250 interactive
workloads.
As we all know, IBM uses a golden screwdriver approach inside the
AS/400, iSeries, and i5 systems to artificially restrict or enable the
processing of the 5250 green-screen protocol that links OS/400 and
i5/OS, their integrated DB2/400 database, and the green screens or
Webified screens as part of RPG and COBOL applications. In the old days,
back in the early 1990s, IBM referred to machines that had little or no
interactive processing as servers, and called those that did a system.
Servers had much lower prices than systems, even though the hardware was
identical. Then, in the late 1990s, IBM called them all AS/400s, and
made interactive capacity available through very expensive interactive
feature cards, which were probably no more than software keys. Then, a
few years ago, after being annoyed by the Fast400 governor buster, IBM
created OS/400 Standard Edition, which has enough interactive capacity
to run a system console, and OS/400 Enterprise Edition, which has the
5250 capacity fully enabled.
If the Fast400 governor buster, which made its debut in October 2001
(just as the IT market was heading south in a big way) was the first
cycle, then Kisco Information Systems's GoFaster is the second cycle.
GoFaster was launched at the end of 2004, just as the people behind
Fast400 sued IBM (see Fast400 Founder Sues Big Blue for all the details
on that). In November 2005, Jim Stracka, who was the main force behind
Fast400, settled his lawsuit with IBM, leaving IBM in control of the
Fast400 code. That makes MAX400 the third cycle in the governor-buster
saga, if you don't count IBM's own governor-circumventing WebFacing
tools and its condoning of looksoftware's lookdirect product. I think
these two are distinct in that they are tied directly to the act of
modernizing an application--helping customers who want to use the
WebFacing or lookdirect tools to put pretty screens on their host-based
applications--and they have IBM's official blessing.
Kisco has been keeping a low profile with the GoFaster tool, according
to Rich Loeber, the company's president. He adds that IBM has put out
some PTF patches for i5/OS that were intended to disable GoFaster, but
they didn't work. Customers are still, 18 months after the announcement
of GoFaster, buying the product, and IBM has not approached Kisco in any
way regarding GoFaster.
Whatever IBM's thoughts are on the matter of MAX400 or GoFaster, I
cannot say. The product managers at the Rochester Labs that I normally
speak with were on holiday when I tried to contact them last week.
According to MAX400, which is based in the capital city of Seoul and
which has been selling its own governor buster in the Asia/Pacific
region for three years, there isn't just the one 5250 governor that we
all know about, called CFINT. Rather, there are many different
governors, and the MAX400 application can be used to essentially disable
them. What that means in plain English is that MAX400 can take a machine
that has 1,000 CPWs of raw capacity and maybe 70 CPWs of interactive
capacity and make the bulk of that raw capacity available for 5250
workloads.
According to Earnst Park, who is vice president of communications at
Max400 in Seoul, the governors in i5/OS and OS/400 can detect when
interactive processing reaches the preset thresholds as determined by
the interactive feature or software edition of the box. While not
divulging how it works--because this is a trade secret--MAX400 can make
interactive workloads look like batch jobs, which means the governors
are not triggered. It doesn't disable a governor so much as preventing
it from being activated in the first place. And, most importantly,
MAX400 does not mess with the licensed internal code of OS/400 or i5/OS
in any way--in the IBM lingo, it is not a patched program. It is a
plain, old program with objects, and it runs like one and you can start
it and kill it like one. Here's one key to how it works: The software
apparently sniffs the memory of a machine as jobs are running and makes
changes to temporary memory areas that prevents the governors from
penalizing interactive workloads that come near the thresholds. MAX400
says that its code has not been used in Fast400, GoFaster, or lookdirect.
Here's the thing that I find completely astounding: How can it be this
easy to circumvent the governors that IBM has put in place? Moreover, if
someone can write a program that can activate latent 5250 capacity,
couldn't someone with nefarious intentions write code that could cut off
5250 capacity? That would be one heck of a hack by a disgruntled
employee. Then again, a disgruntled employee could just launch a killer
SQL query, or yank out two disk drives. I guess my point is, if IBM
doesn't want people tapping into the capacity inherent in the hardware,
then IBM should make it so they can't. And as I have said a lot of times
during the Fast400 saga, I think IBM should never have priced 5250
capacity so high and should not have even packaged it this way. The high
price and the circumventable governors give smart hackers the motive and
the means to defeat the governors.
Both MAX400's Park and Jared Johnson, director of marketing for SEPE,
the first North American distributor of MAX400 and the company best
known for its OS/400-based fax server software, say that they are
intending for MAX400 to be used on a "temporary basis." The idea,
apparently, is that MAX400 is aimed at companies that are hitting the
ceiling on interactive performance and they need some help until they
come up with the budget to do a proper iSeries or i5 upgrade. "What
we're really trying to do is help customers with small budgets who need
more interactive CPW," explains Johnson. "We really want companies to
keep their applications on the platform. MAX400 is just an intermediary
step until they do their next upgrade"
MAX400 works on any AS/400, iSeries, or i5 machine that has the 5250
governors restricting interactive capacity on them, and it works with
OS/400 V4R1 through V5R2 and i5/OS V5R3 and V5R4. It is unclear if
MAX400 can turn an i5 Standard Edition box into one with the same 5250
processing capacity as an Enterprise Edition machine based on the same
hardware, or if it can be used to enable 5250 capacity activated by
IBM's Enterprise Enablement features. (I asked a direct question on
this, and got a vague answer.) MAX400 says that its governor buster
consumes less than 1 percent of a CPU's capacity as it runs, and that it
will not interfere with other programs or processes running on OS/400 or
i5/OS systems. SEPE, which is based in Costa Mesa, California, is
selling MAX400 on a rental basis for use on a machine for six, nine, or
twelve months at a time. To rent it on a machine in the P05 software
tier costs $1,900 for six months, rising to $4,300 for a machine in the
P60 class. That is very little money to activate what are very expensive
interactive processing capacity chunks according to the IBM iSeries and
i5 catalog. |
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